SOME HISTORY ON MAGLEVS

Enjoy!!!

COMMENT FROM POPULAR SCIENCE MAGAZINE
page 135
DATED MAY 1989

MAGLEV, NOT WAR?

A concept for levitating passenger trains with superconducting magnets earned a patent for James Powell and Gordon Danby at New York’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in the late 1960s. Henry Kolm and Richard Thornton at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrated a working 1/125th scale maglev vehicle, called magneplane, based on the concept, in the early 1970s (Dec. ’73). Budget constraints in the mid 70s ended federal funding of maglev research however. Now Kolm and others want to leapfrog Japanese and German maglev by reviving Magneplane technology: These maglev vehicles, using superconducting magnets for repulsion and propulsion, would whisk passengers between U.S. cities along elevated aluminum troughs – lighter and less expensive than German and Japanese test-track guideways. Magneplanes – 100 passenger vehicles departing every few minutes – would “fly” 12 inches above the guideway. Maximum speed for best efficiency would be 224 mph, say Kolm.

He’s getting help, buttons labeled “Maglevs, Not War” appeared on a few lapels in Washington, D.C., last year (“88). The reason: to show support for bills introduced by New York State Senator Daniel Moynihan that would aid in the development of magnetic-levitation vehicles. Moynihan’s bill asked NASA and the Department of Transportation to demonstrate the feasibility of maglev technology.

Maglev transportation is inevitable, Moynihan believes, “If we fail to move aggressively forward in this field, we will lose an opportunity to commercialize superconductivity and lead a revolution that our scientists have set in motion. We might leave it to the Europeans and Japanese. That would be a national tragedy,” he says.

Moynihan was also trying to eliminate legal impediments that might hinder building maglev lines along the median strips of interstate highways. A study on piggybacking maglev onto the interstate highway system, headed by Powell and Danby, was slated to be submitted to Moynihan in 1989, then to President Bush.